page_title: Church of Saint Sava
section_title: Structural implementation
hierarchical_section_title: Church of Saint Sava / Architecture / Interior / Mosaics / Structural implementation
caption_attribution_description: English: Stub konha na galeriji
context_page_description: The Church of Saint Sava is a Serbian Orthodox church which sits on the Vračar plateau in Belgrade, Serbia. It was planned as the bishopric seat and main cathedral of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The church is dedicated to Saint Sava, the founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church and an important figure in medieval Serbia. It is built on the presumed location of St. Sava's grave. His coffin had been moved from Mileševa Monastery to Belgrade. It was placed on a pyre and burnt in 1595 by Ottoman Grand Vizier Sinan Pasha. Bogdan Nestorović and Aleksandar Deroko were finally chosen to be the architects in 1932 after a second revised competition in 1926/27. This sudden decision instigated an important debate in interwar Yugoslavia which centred around the temple's size, design and symbolic national function. This was accompanied by a sizeable increase in the base area of the ambitiously conceived project. The new design departed from the competition guidelines issued in 1926, and was to replicate the dimensions and architecture of Hagia Sophia.
  The first stone was laid in 1935. When Yugoslavia was under occupation in 1941, the construction was approximately ten metres high.
context_section_description: Realization of the mosaic works began on 28 September 2016 with the visit of Hilarion, director of the church Foreign Office in the Moscow Patriarchate and chairman of the Russo-Serbian commission at the Russian Academy. Zurab Tsereteli, Nikolaj Mukhin, Yevgeniy Maksimov and the acting director to the support of UNESCO, Manana Popova, presented the approved scale model.
  The first seating of the commission for the mosaic works to place on 17 March 2017 in the Moscow atelier where the mosaic artwork was created.
  Zurab Tsereteli as the coordinator of the artistic works expressed his gratitude to the authors at this first meeting. All mosaics were commissioned in the Moscow atelier in their original size, then cut and transported to Belgrade. The first ten tonnes of mosaics arrived in Belgrade on 3 May 2017. With a working platform at 43 m in the church, the mosaics were lifted with a specially constructed elevator.
  The artists of the mosaics were chosen from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Moscow and the Repin Institute of Arts at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg.
caption: Tetrapylons in the south and north galleries are decorated with floral and anthropomorphic motifs
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